Ron Howard interview: 'Jay-Z reminds me of Frank Sinatra'

A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard speaks to Horatia Harrod about filming
rapper Jay-Z's Made in America music festival

Two years ago, Ron Howard had never been to a music festival. So it was something of a surprise when Jay-Z – the most successful rapper in the world, but whose music Howard had never knowingly listened to – asked him to make a documentary about a music festival he was putting on in Philadelphia.

It was a last-minute arrangement: Howard would have only 10 days to prepare. “I think the fact that I didn’t have a lot of time to question it was probably a healthy thing for me,” Howard tells me. “The only thing I could do was kind of be a stranger in a strange land and apply my curiosity to it.”

At 60, Howard, the Oscar-winning director of A Beautiful Mind, is still boyish-looking. When he flits on screen during the film, he is dressed in the ageless American uniform of jeans and baseball cap. All the same, he must have made an incongruous sight backstage, “trolling for interviews”, as he puts it – trying to get a minute of Rita Ora’s time, or, in one of the most unlikely scenes in the film, talking earnestly with the anarchic 23-year-old rapper Tyler, the Creator about why he chose to dress as a bewigged centaur in one of his music videos.

It was probably the unlikeliness of the collaboration – aside from his lack of interest in music, Howard had never made a documentary – that got him the job. “Jay-Z was interested in promoting the idea of rigid genres disappearing in popular culture,” says Howard. “He said to me, you make all kinds of movies, tell all kinds of stories, and maybe you can find an interesting story here.”

Howard was anxious, all the same, and grilled his friend Jonathan Demme, director of a trilogy of concert films about Neil Young as well as the 1984 Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense, about the demands of documentary-making. “I cornered him in the parking lot,” says Howard, “and said, give me a couple of clues. And he just basically gave me the best advice: develop a point of view and pursue that, but be ready to recognise that that may not be your movie. If you try to force something on the footage, it’ll be very frustrating for you.”

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Howard’s footage spans from grunge stalwarts Pearl Jam and sci-fi-inspired R&B artist Janelle Monáe, to the surviving members of Run DMC and, of course, Jay-Z himself, all performers at the two-day Made in America festival.

“I really understood why Jay-Z was great when I photographed him,” says Howard. “It reminded me of a moment of revelation I had many years ago. I went with a friend to see Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, in the last year that he was performing. He wasn’t necessarily on top form, but the way he could connect with an audience and the way he communicated through the lyrics was something I hadn’t ever really seen before.”

Aside from the musicians, the film has a supporting cast that includes a disillusioned roadie, a woman running a sandwich stall and a 103-year-old local resident aggrieved by what she characterises as “bang bang music” (but who changes her mind when she hears soul singer Jill Scott doing some flamenco-style scatting). “They helped to offer some of the perspective I wanted,” says Howard. “It allows you to look at the festival from a lot of different perspectives, a little bit like Robert Altman’s movie from the Seventies, Nashville.”

A still from Ron Howard's Made in America

One of Howard’s heroes is Billy Wilder and, like Wilder, Howard has tried never to be constrained by genre, turning his hand to thrillers (including two Dan Brown adaptations, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons), comedies (beginning with his 1977 debut, Grand Theft Auto, which cost $600,000 to make and took $18 million at the box office), fantasy films (Willow, Splash) and character-centred dramas (Frost/Nixon).

“It can be a little confusing, I know,” he says, wryly. “As a director, I’ve wanted to have adventure in my life, creative adventure. I think it’s partly because I grew up, basically from age six to 26, mostly on television series where the producers find something that works and then do it over and over and over again.”

Howard’s first screen appearance came when he was 18 months old, in a western called The Journey. His parents were actors, and took the family from Oklahoma to Hollywood when Howard was four years old. He worked throughout his childhood and teenage years. Jug-eared and red-headed, he looked like a kid from a Norman Rockwell painting brought to life, and his small-town charm ensured an eight-year stint playing Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, and then six years as squeaky-clean Richie Cunningham in the Fifties-set sitcom Happy Days.

Having picked up a strong work ethic when he was a boy, he has directed, produced and acted in hundreds of films – which partly explains why he’s never really been interested in music festivals. “I was always too busy,” he says. “I enjoyed the environment at Made in America, but I don’t know if I would take a weekend and devote it to a festival for pleasure. It’s not the way my psyche operates.”

How about Richie Cunningham? Would he have liked the Made in America festival? Howard laughs. “I think the Fonz probably would belong in the Jay-Z era,” he says. “The Cunninghams were trying to be as cooperative with the mainstream as they possibly could. They might be cranky for a minute, but they’d probably see the humanity in what was going on around them at the end of the day.”